By Daniel Buckwalter
Photographer Mattias Klum
“Mattias, have you asked the trees for permission?”
Mattias Klum was on a photographic and writing assignment in the vast and dense rain forest inside Malaysian Borneo for National Geographic in the mid-1990s, and he was struggling. He was struggling to find perfect light and any good photo opportunities.
The anxiety was wearing on him because time is of the essence with large assignments, so Danny Chew — a native, good friend and Klum’s “fixer,” so to speak — traveled 14 hours to track Klum down in the rain forest to ask that simple question.
In a sense, this was a spiritually transformative moment for Klum. He took the time to settle with the trees and animals in this section of Borneo and the result was his first National Geographic cover story in 1997, Malaysia’s Secret Realm, complete with gorgeous photos, and making him the first Swede to have his work featured on the cover of the magazine.
He told this story and others as he showed a slew of photos from his work around the globe on Nov. 10 to a receptive audience at the Hult Center’s Silva Concert Hall. The Planet in Our Hands was the first of three talks in the 2024-25 Changemaker Speaker Series at the Hult Center, and it was engaging as well as sobering.
Klum was born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1968. He has worked full time as a photographer since 1985 and as a cinematographer and director on numerous film and television projects since 1994.
More than once on that Sunday evening, Klum noted that he was “preaching to the choir,” but it’s what is needed as the planet continues to hurtle toward climate catastrophe.
“We’re putting unprecedented pressure on our planet,” he said. “We randomly cut the necessities of life.”
To illustrate his point, Klum put up aerial photos he took from hot air balloons of decimated rain forests in portions of Borneo and elsewhere on Earth. He noted, too, that when these forests, so vital to the planet’s vital ecosystem, are destroyed, the harm spills throughout the globe, and he had a poignant shot of an exhausted mother polar bear in the Arctic with her two cubs to make the point that glaciers are disappearing.
“It’s like a house of cards,” he said. “All things are related.”
Klum finds solace in the animals he photographs, “the ambassadors” to his and others’ efforts to avoid climate catastrophe, and especially small animals, whom he calls “the ecosystem engineers.”
“I’m a positive person in general,” he said, adding that he tries to bridge the heart and the brain by being “anchored in science.”
“It’s a huge privilege to build a more just future.”
More about Mattias Klum: MattiasKlum.com
The Changemaker Speaker Series at the Hult Center continues on Feb. 27 when Austrian mountaineer Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner comes to Eugene and concludes on May 5 when National Geographic photographer and marine conservationist Andy Mann speaks.
Information and tickets: hultcenter.org
